


For us

by coeurgryffondor



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst and Feels, Childbirth, Complications from childbirth, F/M, Gen, Heavy Angst, Just ALL THE ANGST, Marriage, Multi, Pregnancy, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-07 12:25:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18620599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coeurgryffondor/pseuds/coeurgryffondor
Summary: Edward always asked if she was ok, and really meant it, and shared her burden and shared his too because even if the weight was the same, sharing it made it lighter somehow, knowing you’re not alone, knowing you’ve got someone else.But no one is ever truly rescued. Not in this family.





	For us

## I

The evening of her seventeenth birthday, her parents come to Hogwarts to pick her up. In silence they embrace before departing the school, Victoire side-along Apparating with her father. They make their way quickly through the Ministry to the small department, her uncle having set everything up for them.

It’s not that this was an unusual event but more than it had become uncommon for young women, on the day they became a legal witch, to marry.

He’s already there, pacing, in his suit that seems slightly too tight for him since his body is filling out so rapidly as he trains. But it’s well fitted, one of the last things his grandmother bought him, for his seventeenth birthday two year earlier. And he has his “natural” look today as they call it, the one where he has his father’s coloring, and when he looks up she thinks suddenly for just a moment if those were the eyes his father had looked at his mother with when they married: eyes filled with wonderment that someone was willing to marry him, and a painful amount of love.

That grin is goofy and lopsided but so is hers, probably, as she steps from between her parents towards him, Edward taking a steps towards her too. His eyes drink her in, so happy, so elated, and she feels like she’s going to giggle before he breathes, “You look beautiful, love.”

“Do I look like a bride?”

He kisses her, chastely, in response.

* * *

After the ceremony and the signing of papers, the four of them return to Hogwarts, Victoire side-along Apparating with her husband this time — she could Apparate on her own, if she wanted, but she didn’t want to, clinging instead to the end of her childhood and, now, the beginning of her adulthood.

They walk together up the path, Edward leading the way, hand holding Victoire’s. He’d bought her a ring, even though she’d said he shouldn’t, and it feels strange on her finger but in the best possible way, Victoire sensing her parents behind them watching them carefully. At the entrance, Headmistress McGonagall greets them, speaking in a hushed voice with her father before nodding to the newlyweds.

“That room–“ she gestures down the hall “–is yours until morning. We will not be feeding you breakfast, Mr Lupin,” but her words soften at his name, Victoire looking up at her husband and blushing just a bit. His face is completely red.

“Don’t worry, Professor, that won’t be necessary.”

The headmistress leaves, and then Victoire hugs her parents each one last time. She’d see them in a few weeks, but still: this is goodbye to something.

Edward embraces her mother sweetly, smiling, before turning to her father and holding out his hand. Bill has always enjoyed picking on Edward, making him uncomfortable in the older man’s presence just to watch him squirm.

But tonight, instead, when they shake hands and Edward says in French, “She’ll never want for anything, Sir, I promise,” Bill pulls Edward to him to hug, and she can’t hear what he says but she sees those words in English that leave her father’s lips.

“I know.”

They make their way down the hall, Edward closing the door softly behind him. It’s a nice little room, probably a staff room, with a comfy couch and a tea set and some snacks, and it connects to another room, smaller, with a double bed.

Victoire flushes: not tonight.

Arms wrap around her waist, her back to his chest, and he kisses down the side of her face and neck as he gently guides her to the couch where they sit, Edward pulling her to his lap.

He smiles like nothing else. “My wife,” he breathes and she starts to cry, just a bit. “You didn’t have to do that,” and she knows what the “that” is, his hand taking hers with the ring he’d bought her, a thin gold band with a tiny white diamond in it.

“All I’ve ever wanted,” and her voice is shaky even though she’s a perfectly fine English speaker, probably spoke in English more than French, but not when she’s emotional, so her voice is shaky, “is to be Mrs Edward Remus Lupin.”

His face softens, and he sighs, and then he runs his hands up her neck and the sides of her face to kiss and kiss and kiss, and they stay like that for a while, kissing softly, kissing tenderly, kissing lovingly, until he sighs again and it’s time for him to go.

Next summer, after she graduates, they’d have a proper wedding: she’d have a big white dress and he’d stand beside his godfather and they’d exchange true wedding rings before all their family and friends before escaping to spend their first night together, truly, as husband and wife.

“Thank you,” he breathes and Victoire smiles. Now he wasn’t alone anymore.

* * *

“You know he told me,” her father complains at the dinner table, Victoire sat next to him, Dominique putting out the plates as Louis walks in and out of the door from the dining room to the kitchen, “he’d come every night he could for dinner.”

“Daddy,” she sighs, “he’s come twice so far this summer.”

“He’s had two and a half months,” Bill points out as Louis this time returns with a dish of food, their mother following him with another.

“He works very hard,” Fleur interjects, putting down the platter and taking her eldest daughter’s hand.

“You know how long training takes each day to become an Auror,” Victoire adds, “he rarely gets home before nine at night, and even if he did get home early, he’d be so exhausted. I can’t imagine he’d want to spend dinner here being interrogated in French.”

Bill raises an eyebrow, swirling his drink. “I….” He takes a sip. “We told him we’d speak in English.”

“Boring!” Louis protests as he sits at the table, earning a slap to the head by his mother.

“He insisted,” Bill continues, “that he didn’t want that: he didn’t want us to change our family to accommodate him.” Her father shrugs. “That is a long day though. When does he leave?”

“Too early,” Fleur answers, taking her seat. “I can only hope this will be done by the time of the wedding next year, once Auror training is over: I don’t want Victoire to have to live like that.”

Victoire, for her part, says nothing.

* * *

No one responds when Headmistress McGonagall says anything about the Head Boy. It’s when she says Head Girl Victoire Lupin that heads flip towards Ravenclaw, the young woman trying her best to ignore them. Someone at the Slytherin table shouts “ow ow!” which diffuses the tension at the cost of drawing the headmistress’s ire, and Victoire would have to thank Dominique for that another time.

* * *

The Daily Prophet is behind when it “breaks” the “scandal,” Victoire doing her best to ignore it but still driven by some compulsion to read the nonsense.

By the time The Evening Prophet comes out, there’s a full page apology, a statement from Minister for Magic Kingsley Shacklebolt, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Hermione Granger, Head of the Auror Office Harry Potter, and one from an elderly woman who said that she’d married an Auror the day she turned seventeen and it was the happiest of her six marriages as he was dead within the week which got her out of a lot of exams. For some reason, that’s the one Edward writes her about as being his favorite.

Then again, it’s the only one that isn’t suspicious to people outside their circle of family and friends.

“While his boss may say Lupin isn’t treated differently from the rest,” The Daily Prophet carries on with the next morning, “let us not forget his boss is also his godfather. Others in the department confirm that Lupin is, in fact, preferred among others.”

“An aunt who was never an Auror shouldn’t speak to Auror matters,” someone had written in, “and furthermore never should have let her niece marry so young. What is wrong with the women in that family?”

“The Minister for Magic,” someone else had written, “while a good leader for this country, ought not interfere when it comes to his step-grandson or else his time in his position might come to an end.”

The Evening Prophet, at last, carries Edward’s statement. It’s not a big thing but it is on the front page, in a little square at the bottom.

“My wife and I ask for respect and privacy from the public. Our marriage is a personal matter but, as there is a curiosity to know something, I will point out that Aurors do not have the longest life expectancy and, as the orphan son of one, I have never in my life needed reminding of that fact. —ERLupin”

They had always planned to get married the summer after she graduated, but the risk of Edward dying before that was too great for him to be comfortable.

“I don’t want you to ever want for anything,” he’d told her as he'd held her in his arms, Victoire crying though this should have been a happy moment, her boyfriend proposing to her. “Even if I’m gone, I will always provide for you.” She could never ask him to not be an Auror, she knew he needed it too deeply and desperately, but she could do this much for him to ease his burden.

* * *

He’s set two of the top five records in the department by the time the wedding is upon them, Harry laughing uncomfortably as Fleur gets very close to him, pointing that out. “He’ll have the week off,” he half offers, turning to Victoire in her white dress as Dominique fusses over her hair.

But she knows the records aren’t her uncle’s doing: Edward works hard, too hard, and set those records for longest continuous days on duty in the Auror department by simply being Edward, a man who doesn’t know how to stop.

“A week!” Fleur shouts indignantly.

* * *

He looks so handsome, his “natural” look and a new suit, his face all love and wonder as Victoire walks down the aisle between her parents. There’s people everywhere but they mean nothing to her, her whole world Edward before her who walks to her as her parents step back, taking her hands as they go, together, to the altar.

* * *

## II

5:00 am: alarm goes off, Teddy already awake waiting for it. He holds Vic to his side, having been watching her sleep for a few minutes. She shifts and stirs at the sound of the alarm.

5:15 am: they’re dressed waiting for the Tube by his apartment — well, his mother’s apartment. He still doesn’t know if his father ever saw it but he’s grateful his grandmother kept it, some semblance of a home.

5:30 am: Harry had gifted Teddy, at his graduation and acceptance into the Auror training program, a gym membership; before the wedding, he gifted Vic one too so that they could spend this precious time together. Her private sessions are probably different from his, which involve a massive amount of strength training and boxing and all sorts of crazy shit that’s practical for an Auror. But still, they’re in the same room with their trainers, and every once and a while she smiles at him.

6:35 am: she presses, exhausted, into him to keep upright as they wait for the Tube back, the bag over his shoulder holding their things. She’s thin and fit and fucking gorgeous and she giggles, pressing into him more at the feel of his stiffening erection. “You know me,” he murmurs and she laughs, nodding.

6:50 am: today they don’t even make it to the shower before sex, Teddy lifting Vic with ease to lay her on their bed and slip into her, fucking her hard and needy. But she takes it all, scratching his back, bucking to meet him, crying out in English and French, fitting so perfectly against him and beside him and beneath him that he can’t take it, she’s so… everything. His hands find hers and he comes inside her, her body still tight around his, his name still tumbling from her lips. It is the first and, probably, only time they will have time alone today.

7:10 am: breakfast is plated, Teddy setting the pans to clean themselves as Vic emerges from their bedroom. It’s normally a quiet meal; most of what they do together normally is. They’ve known each other for so long that there’s rarely much that needs to be vocalized to be said, to be heard. “I’ll give them credit,” Vic breathes as she forks an egg, “being an Auror has done wonders for your performance,” and Teddy spits tea on himself as he laughs.

7:25 am: at the door she kisses him, his head bent down to meet hers, her pert little body pressed up and into his. He knows she knows it might be their last kiss ever, each day at this time, so they try to make it count. “I love you,” she whispers and he grabs the side of her neck, kissing her again with more passion.

“I love you too, Vic.”

9:47 pm: the door gives under his hand, Teddy relieved to be home before 10pm. The lamp is on in the corner so he can see, locking the door, making his way through the sitting room, finding dinner — he keeps telling her she shouldn’t — waiting for him under a warming spell. He eats it standing up, trying to be quiet, but still the door to the bedroom cracks open and Vic appears in his shirt and some slippers, rubbing her eyes. “Go back to sleep,” he says with a grin, “I’ll be there soon, babe,” and she nods and does as he’d said. He leaves his dish for tomorrow to wash, turning off the light and entering the bedroom to strip down in the moonlight that washes over his body, another scar forming hidden by his Metamorphic skills. He slips into bed, pressing against Vic’s back and ass, and she moans and snuggles up to him before returning to sleep.

Teddy kisses the back of her head and wishes, once more, he was a better husband giving her a better life than this.

* * *

## III

Her mother is worried, sitting at the kitchen table. Victoire hates when her mother is worried, sitting at the kitchen table.

“I’m worried,” Fleur states, unnecessarily, but it’s part of the dance and Victoire has always been a graceful dancer.

“I know you are, Maman, but you can’t do anything so there’s no point in it. I’m happy,” she states for what feels like the hundredth Wednesday in a row where her mother visits to help her pass the time and instead sets Victoire on edge. “This is what I want.”

“Is it though?” and her mother leans forward, and she’s never been sure if that’s an actual question or somewhat rhetorical. “Your husband has a dangerous job, and he leaves so early, and he comes home so late–“

“My husband is my concern alone,” Victoire interrupts sharply and her mother sits up at that, blinking, remembering that of all her children, Victoire is the most her. “We’re happy. I’m happy.”

“How long will this go on for?” Fleur asks. “I thought, after his training was done–“

“There’s not enough highly qualified Aurors, and Edward doesn’t like the ones there are, and Harry is being pulled every which way so Edward gets loaded with work from the others, but he does it to keep us safe. He does it for us.”

Fleur is still and quiet, and puts a hand on the table, and Victoire takes it and begins to cry.

“He does it for us,” and her mother comes around to hug her — to hold her.

* * *

She knows she let a lot of people down when she announced she’d be a stay-at-home wife. Edward fretted about it, because he didn’t want her to feel obliged to do this, he didn’t want her to think he was asking her to conform to some old fashioned ideal of a wife.

The name change.

The staying at home.

The doting over him.

It’s not part of living up to some ideal. Victoire long along learned you can’t make everyone happy, a birthday never celebrated on her birthday, a name with dark memories only implied but never voiced, a weight put on a child for things she wasn’t alive to experience or know.

But Edward always wished her a happy birthday on her birthday, even though it was the day his parents died. And Edward always introduced her as Victoire, not Vic, even though it was a victory that cost him his parents and it’s only in the last few years others have been able to say her name too. And Edward always asked if she was ok, and really meant it, and shared her burden and shared his too because even if the weight was the same, sharing it made it lighter somehow, knowing you’re not alone, knowing you’ve got someone else.

All her brilliance, all her skill, all her OWLs and NEWTs, they weren’t for naught: they were because someone needs to take care of Edward Remus Lupin, orphan with not a single family member left and a compulsion to be an Auror, to prove something to the world, to prove something to parents who will never see nor know him.

* * *

He comes home and it’s 11:37 pm on a Saturday and she couldn’t sleep, not knowing he was still out there working on breaking his own record without meaning to, so she’s there to see him stop just inside the door and drop his bag to the ground and change, truly change, morphing or maybe, better put, relaxing into his actual natural appearance. Their eyes are locked as Edward’s hair darkens to Black black and there’s scars all over his body, and a huge burn still healing across one cheek, and he’s crying so she runs to him and holds him as he gasps against her, because even if he’s watched people die before, it still tore him up inside.

He now has the top three records in the Auror department, for continuous days worked: forty three. She knows tomorrow it’ll be forty four.

* * *

## IV

The VFW tattoo under his wedding ring make him smile, sitting on the edge of the bed and waiting for Vic. The ERL tattoo under her wedding ring make him even happier, even if Dom thought he needed better initials so people would stop asking her sister, “Who’s Earl?”

It’s his first day off in forty nine days, breaking his fourth record in the department. They were going to originally go to Paris, get food Vic likes that Teddy can barely pronounce the name of, but at the last moment she told him she wanted to stay in.

She wanted to talk.

When he looks up and she’s wearing lingerie, he’s confused: this didn’t feel like how talking starts.

“Vic?”

The blonde smiles something mischievous and sexy, slinking her way to him to straddle his hips and draw his face up to hers.

“Vic?” he croaks again, not sure what was happening.

“I’m ready,” she breathes and his heart skips a beat because he’d told her she didn’t have to be, that when he’d suggested they start thinking about when they wanted to have kids, she could take years and years to decide. Their marriage started off to protect her, should Teddy not come home one night, as unfair burden to ask of her because, in the end, every Auror spouse has to open the door to that news. Once they were truly married, the burden grew because of his exhausting schedule, day in and day out, weekends a luxury other people got to have, but she changed her sleeping pattern and never once indicated resentment at sharing his strange life. And now — now she was–

“I’ve never been more ready,” she says against his lips, “for anything in all my life. Make love to me, Edward,” and so he does.

* * *

At first she insists on still coming to the gym, even if she does nothing, just to spend the time with him. He’s finally convinced her to stay in bed, to keep sleeping, and that he would wake her when he returned to shower so that they could lay together and cuddle for just a few minutes, or else — if she wanted it because Teddy would never push her — make love. Which sounded more romantic than it really was, they were still trying to figure out how best to accommodate her swollen belly in the act, but Teddy didn’t care. This was his love, his life, his everything, his best friend since he was a child, an orphan with a grandmother and a godfather and that was it.

She was his family, and soon they’d have a baby.

He wants more already but denies himself it, instead running his hands over her stomach and waiting for Vic to speak, Teddy pressed against her back. “You’re always,” she starts as she catches her breath, “spectacular in the morning.” He laughs.

“I don’t know if we’ve had sex after noon more than five times at this point.”

“Good thing I’m a morning person.” He laughs again because his Victoire is fundamentally not, or at least she wasn’t until she was seventeen. “How many more days?” she asks and he grips her flesh, feeling the baby kick against his hand and his heart beat speeding up.

“Eleven. Then I told them to act as if I’m dead until the baby’s six months old.” He held the record for most vacation time ever accrued in the Ministry for Magic: what better way to use it then to actually spend time with his wife and child?

“Eleven more days,” Vic sighs.

* * *

There’s something, his father-in-law had told him, about being the only man in the room during childbirth. Teddy thinks he nows understands, holding one of Vic’s legs back, her mother on her other side, and he’s never loved his wife more than he does now as she pushes with all she has, gives him her everything again even though he could never deserve it, and then there’s a beat before a baby cries and Vic cries and Teddy cries and then the baby is on Vic’s chest and he holds them both so close, so tight, and while he tries not to think of them too much because even now it’s too painful, he thinks of his parents on the day he was born and knows that at least they shared this.

Vic looks at him with exhausted eyes as the baby screams and Teddy, for the first time in his life, truly understands how his parents were able to do what they did, to leave him behind and fight and die, because he would do fucking anything for the two people in his arms.

* * *

The first week Vic has massive complications, struggling to move, her vision coming and going. The Healer says that it’s some condition in the Delacour family that Fleur never had the pleasure of but an aunt had, which will either go away soon or become permanent; Teddy wants to hex the Healer for say something so upsetting, even if true, to his wife with a blind great aunt.

The second week Teddy gets summons for failure to appear for duty, quickly followed by a note from Harry saying to ignore that, he would take care of it, that in the change of head of office and department and minister, someone had put Teddy down as on duty every day for the six months he had off, and Harry calls it a sick joke but Teddy knows that was someone honest to Merlin forgetting he was out.

The third week Vic is asleep, having resigned herself to never being able to see again, and Teddy is cradling the baby in his arms, watching his wife. He didn’t mind doing everything, making all their meals, doing the dishes, the laundry, changing diapers, tending to the baby, bringing him to his mother’s breast and then burping him after. Hell, Teddy would take that duty from Vic too if he could, but breastfeeding was the only thing that made her happy these days. She cries all night and Teddy tries not to cry too because he doesn’t deserve to cry, holding his wife and being strong for her.

Then his son sneezes and his hair changes color.

Teddy’s eyes go wide, and a grin breaks out slowly, and he feels that much closer to his parents seeing his son change hair color again, then again, then back to the dark blond he’d been born with.

“You are something else, Remus,” Teddy murmurs and his son coos.

* * *

The fifth week Vic screams as he’s in the kitchen with Remus, and he comes running in to her crying and sitting up and holding out her arms, “I want to see my baby, Teddy please, my baby, my baby!” He moves quickly, they shift so she can hold him, and she cries and cries and he realizes that means her vision is back and hopes it will stay.

Teddy kisses the side of her head and finally admits their son’s secret into her ear, now that she can see it for herself.

* * *

Too soon he’s six months old. The alarm goes off at 5am, as usual, and Teddy goes about his old routine, Vic still in bed even when he gets back from the gym. He showers, then checks on the baby, then goes to wake Vic who stirs before frowning before realizing.

“Don’t want you to go,” she yawns in French.

“I know,” and he strokes the side of her face. “I know.”

“Will you be home tonight?”

“I’ll try.”

* * *

It’s after midnight when he gets home. Vic is asleep, but Remus is awake, so Teddy powers through his exhaustion to hold his son, bouncing him gently and letting go of his anger at work, at the other Aurors dumping all their work on him, at the new head of the office who is a dipshit letting them, at Harry for now being too powerful to pay attention to him, at his parents for dying.

The spiral is dark and deep and he hates it so Teddy resists: not for himself, but for Vic and the baby.

* * *

## V

Uncle Ron smiles wide at the door. “Let me tell you,” he says, “about how I came to be the world’s greatest stay-at-home parent,” and Victoire bursts into tears that make him laugh as he steps in, hugging her and kissing her head.

* * *

He comes a couple days a week, Fleur coming some others, Molly some others. But it’s Ron, truly, who does the most for Victoire: he’s been an Auror, he knows the schedule, but he’s also been the stay-at-home spouse who disappointed others but did it for his partner, because when you love someone you do things like that, and Ron showed Victoire what it was to be a spouse and a partner and a parent and a good person.

When she tells him her woes, he doesn’t offer solutions.

When she cries silently, he doesn’t say a word.

When she feels overwhelmed, he picks up wherever she had left off and keeps going.

Over time, it gets easier, and then visits from Uncle Ron are more for company and companionship than sympathy and help.

* * *

Edward is working again, like crazy, because he refuses to give the other Aurors any reason to bother him when the next baby is born. Victoire lets him rant and rave as he tidies up their bedroom, a rare Saturday where he got home at 8:30pm and was able to see Remus to bed. Victoire, propped up on pillows and rubbing her growing baby bump, simply watches and admires the way his muscles move or the particular angles of his body as he reaches for something behind a piece of furniture.

The new rhythm had been nice, once Victoire was ready to start working out again, and the gym loved having Remus sleeping in his carrier or else being cooed over by staff members. They couldn’t necessarily make love every morning as they used to, nor eat breakfast together; some mornings Victoire would be left tending to Remus as Edward ran around so he wouldn’t be late. But still, it had been a return to something they’d grown accustomed to, just with more naps for Victoire in the middle of the day and a new family member joining them.

And soon there would be four Lupins.

“What?” Edward asks, eyeing his wife suspiciously before immediately falling. Classic Edward.

“I was simply admiring my husband. Can’t I do that?”

“With such grace and poise,” Edward jokes as he rises, swinging his hips as he walks to the bed, “how could you not?” He lays beside her, curling around her protectively, something he’s possibly never noticed but Victoire loves about him. He rubs her stomach, running his hand over and over it as he watches the movement before looking at her and making her heart melt. “You really are amazing.”

“I do this for us.” The Healers were more cautious now, after the complications she’d had last time, but Victoire still wanted another baby. She didn’t want Remus to have a big age gap, as between Dominique and Louis; the gap between Victoire and Dominique was much better, less than two years.

And she also didn’t want Remus to be an only child like Edward was. Sure he’d always have cousins, the Weasleys weren’t exactly a family lacking in that area, but Victoire loved her siblings in a different way than her cousins even if Dominique was a massive headache and Louis was always so standoffish. Her siblings understood her better than her parents, Dominique knew just what to write in her letters from Egypt and Louis was quite elegant in his letters from Beauxbatons.

Edward “hmm”s and kisses her and Victoire breathes, “I want you,” and he obliges her, laying her out gently, tending to her every need, and everything is right with the world.

* * *

She’s exhausted, the baby on her chest, Edward helping little Remus up to see. “Baby,” her husband coos in French, their son curiously looking at their daughter. The little boy’s eyebrows furrow, and he looks to his mother’s stomach, and then at the baby, and then at his father. “Yeah, it’s crazy,” Edward agrees and Victoire breathes easy, stroking her baby’s back.

* * *

Over lunch she had accidentally mentioned to her mother that Edward’s paternal grandmother had been named Hope, and if there was one thing the Delacour family had gotten into, it was noun-based names for women.

But Hope wasn’t really a name her French speaking family could say — they struggled enough with Remus Lupin and always called Edward by his full name or rather its French form, Édouard, a habit she’d picked up from them. Which was how Victoire found herself on the couch, Remus cuddled against her stomach, watching Edward lay on the floor and coo, over and over, for “Espie! Espie!”

At some point she’d tell him that the French noun for “hope” was “espoir,” not “espére,” but not today. Today was a rare day off, and they were going to enjoy it, together, in their sitting room where Remus had learned to walk while Edward was at work, and to talk while Edward was at work, and to control his Metamorphic abilities while Edward was at work. Maybe he wouldn’t miss all of Espie’s firsts too.

“Daddy,” and Remus squirms, making his way off the couch and to his father to wrap his arms around his neck, Edward laughing and picking him up, scooping up Espie in his other arm. Merlin, he was a great father: for all that he missed, when he was home, Edward gave the children his everything despite his exhaustion and tension and own needs.

Their eyes meet, and Victoire loves him even more in that moment than she ever has. She might have made many mistakes in her life, but Edward would never be one of them.

* * *

## VI

Espie sleeps in his arms, Remus holding his mother’s hand as they wait for the Tube. Once on they settle in, Teddy content to hold all their bags and his daughter, smiling down at his wife sitting with their son on her lap who was happily telling her about some story he’d come up with.

“Children shouldn’t be up at this time,” someone volunteers which ruins the happy little moment, Espie stirring, Remus falling silent, Vic holding him closer. Teddy turns and smiles without meaning it, the Black sneer he was born with that makes the man in his suit twitch.

“Your opinion has been registered but is not desired.”

* * *

He runs to try to find the last of his things, feeling guilty Vic would have to do the dishes — Teddy always did the dishes, he wasn’t a good husband but he was the best he could be — but things are just missing, and he can’t find them, and when he emerges from the bedroom again there’s Remus scolding Espie for taking things, pulling her by her smaller hand to stand before their father who was on the verge of being late.

His son holds up the missing things and Espie cries.

Without hesitation Teddy bends down to hug them both, as tightly as he can, because it was one thing to be cruel to Vic but so much more to saddle his children with this life, a life where they only saw their father from 5:10 to 6:50 and then 7:05 to 7:25 and then normally not again.

Two hours.

He spent two hours a day with his children who meant more to him than anything or anyone else, children he had wanted so much but didn’t deserve.

They’d sleep soon, he knew from what Vic had told him, a long nap from about 10am until after noon, then have a late lunch, then play a bit, then hold out for dinner in the hopes that “Daddy might be home!” before giving in to their mother and eating and going to bed.

He kisses both their heads and Espie squeezes him as Remus says, “Sorry Daddy.”

“You did great, son.”

* * *

For this rare day off, he has to split his time three ways.

For the morning he takes Remus out for breakfast, and lets him get everything he wants off the menu. Then they go to some Muggle museum Teddy loved as a kid, and Remus makes the most amazing faces at the sight of dinosaur bones, and they hit the gift shop way too hard on the way out because Teddy has a lot of his inheritance left and gets paid literally all the overtime, Minister for Magic and aunt-in-law Hermione Granger having removed the cap on that for him in an attempt to shame his office into having other people work too.

It hadn’t worked, but Remus on the walk from the Tube past the park to the apartment is so excited with his new dinosaur toy that’s almost as big as the five year old, and that’s all the payment Teddy needs in life, hugging his son just before they go into the apartment and murmuring, “I love you so much, Remus,” and feeling that wonderful tightening of the hug in response.

For the afternoon he takes Espie out for lunch, and orders for them because one time he let Espie get everything she wants off the menu and learned just how much bigger her eyes are than her stomach. But she doesn’t care, talking the whole time, and where Remus is a somber man in a little boy’s body, Espie is either a teenager or a retired busybody in a three year old’s body. They don’t take the Tube, instead walking, Espie alternating between “Down, Daddy!” and “Up, Daddy!” and he lets her because he loves her, the way she cuddles her head against his neck and shoulder, the absolute adoration his daughter has for her father, her little giggle and the soft blonde curls around her face that come from her mother. It had taken Remus three weeks to show his Metamorphic power; it had taken Espie four months.

They sit in the shade of a tree, and Espie just talks and talks, and Teddy listens as attentively as he can, and eventually she falls asleep so he holds her to him as she naps, then carries her home, then puts her to bed where her little arms grip him and refuse to let go.

“I love you so much, Espie,” and she smiles in her sleep.

For the evening he takes Vic out for dinner, which is really just their kitchen table but with a tablecloth on it and a small candle lit. She’s breathtaking though in a dress that shows how long her body still is even if it’s softer too, rounder breasts, rounder hips, a little bump to her stomach that would never leave and she hated but Teddy quite liked because it was proof that she had done this unbelievably incredible thing twice called having a baby, and it wasn’t all a dream.

He pops the bottle of wine, his first time drinking since their wedding, and Vic laughs as he tells her about his day, and her hand keeps falling to his arm, and his hand keeps sliding up her thigh, and they skip dessert for moving to the bedroom and sealing the door and making love and making a baby.

Now Teddy would need two hands to count how many times they’ve had sex after noon. Things were looking up.

* * *

## VII

She’s five months pregnant, and the children have just been coaxed to bed, and there’s a knock at the door as she moves through the sitting room, and she knows.

She just knows.

Edward always said, the knock always comes.

Harry is there, and so is Ron.

She gasps before they say anything, falling into her uncles’ arms, and Harry says in a hushed tone so as not to wake the children but still be heard over her cries, “He’s not dead, Vic, he’s not dead.”

“But you’re here,” she manages, “and it’s late.”

Ron lifts her, and together they get her standing, and Harry takes her hand and doesn’t let go. “He’s at St Mungo’s, Ron will stay with the kids, but we need to go.”

Edward might not be dead yet, but it was always a matter of time.

* * *

He’s unconscious but he’s not relaxed into his natural state. They both know when he dies, he will, and Victoire will no longer be the only person in the world to know what Edward truly looks like, but for now he’s not and there’s some comfort in that, Victoire carefully sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over her husband, stroking the side of his face and studying him carefully because any moment could be the last of this face that he modeled all those years ago on a photograph of his father and then stuck to, because it was all he had of his parents: this ability and some photographs.

Harry loiters by the door but never says anything, and Victoire ignores him in favor of laying out beside her husband as if his arm was wrapped around her, her stomach pressing against him. She cries quietly and grips his chest and falls asleep like that.

* * *

## VIII

Vic is in the chair beside the bed, and her stomach is bigger than he remembers, and it’s not a comfortable enough chair for her to be sleeping in it by choice.

“You’re in St Mungo’s,” a voice to his other side says, a deep voice he knows but rarely talks to — not for any reason beyond that he has no reason to anymore, not really.

Teddy manages to turn his head and take in Kingsley.

“You’ve been here for almost two months.”

He nods. So his wife is in her third trimester and Espie is now four. Another missed birthday.

“We… honestly thought you weren’t going to make it.” Kingsley leans forward, aged, tired, burdened. A hand brushes Teddy’s and he lets him, lets him press palm to back of hand and squeeze.

Part of Teddy wants Kingsley to say something selfish, like “I couldn’t go through that again” or “after your grandmother” but he doesn’t, because he’s a strong man who lost his wife, his son, and then his wife again.

“Victoire didn’t want the children to see you in hospital, unconscious: she didn’t think Espie would understand and thought Remus would take it too hard.”

Teddy nods: they both knew their kids well.

Kingsley shifts, switching which hand holds Teddy’s, the free one now moving to stroke the side of his head. “Did I ever tell you how once I waited at the side of your mother’s bed for weeks?”

He does his best to shake his head, not trusting his voice just yet, not wanting to give it to anyone but Vic.

“She’d just about finished training when a mission went wrong, and she had better instincts than her partner who did the wrong thing. We thought… I thought we were going to lose another good Auror too soon.” He sighs. “I’ve been thinking about that, about that woman named Tonks I sat with because I had nowhere else to go and she’d instructed the office that she didn’t want her parents visiting her, seeing her like that, if we thought she wouldn’t make it.” He smiles, a little, sadly, and grips the side of Teddy’s face, his eyes that had drifted about the room coming to rest on him. “Another time, I owe you too many stories.”

Teddy nods.

* * *

Harry’s barely gotten him into bed, Vic at the door with her hands on her stomach watching anxiously. Teddy hadn’t wanted to spend any more time in the hospital than was necessary, the last week of recovery he wanted to be in his own bed in his grandmother’s house, because the apartment was too small now and he’d promised Vic he’d make the house up real nice for her and the kids, they’d have the best childhood they could, Teddy would see to it: his mother had been raised here, and he’d been raised here, and now they would too.

In the shadows of ghosts.

The scratching at the door could easily have been desperate puppies or annoyed cats but once he’s in bed, nodding at to his wife with a grin, she smiles a little too and opens the door and Remus and Espie burst in, jumping onto the bed and crawling to their father and crying against him and demanding hugs and kisses and attention and affection. Harry tries to corral them, Remus especially who’s gotten so big at six, but Teddy pushes his godfather away without hesitation to grip the boy tighter, Espie settled against him and held as close as possible just like she liked it.

“Daddy.”

“Daddy!”

“Daddy.”

The cries alternate, and Vic has her face half covered with her hands as she cries, her uncle moving to stand beside her, and Teddy tells his babies, over and over, that he loves them, he loves them, he loves them so much, he’s so sorry, he’s here now, he loves them, he loves, he loves them.

How could he have left when there was a chance he wouldn’t come back?

How could his parents have left when there was a chance they wouldn’t come back?

“Daddy!”

* * *

It’s 5am, and Vic is asleep, Teddy propped up watching her. He’s not been back to work since he’s been home, Harry had insisted he stay home until the baby was born and he’d had his paternal leave, and Teddy hadn’t argued because he knew what was important. Vic is huge, nine months, Healers calling and checking her every day because this was a risky pregnancy, her riskiest yet, but she’d insisted she’d wanted three children. “Our family will never be complete,” she’d told him, “until there’s five of us. I’m doing this for us.”

Tearing himself from her with one last kiss to her cheek and kiss to her stomach, Teddy creeps from the room. He looks first in on Remus who sleeps in what was his grandparents’ room; he kisses his head and enjoys the way the boy snuggles closer, something that he tried to no longer do while awake because he thought at six he was too old for snuggles anymore. Down the hall he watches Espie in his mother’s childhood room, the way she’s splayed out across the bed, a wild child with a heart of gold, and he can’t help but lay beside her for a half hour, thinking about how crazy it was to love someone else this much.

The last room he looks into had been his. Now it was restored to the nursery his father and grandfather had set up, waiting for the last Lupin child to be born.

His grandmother had once let slip that his mother had wanted three children.

Down the creaky stairs he moves from the sitting room covered in toys to the dining room to the kitchen to the next set of stairs to the basement where his father spent full moons. The strict magic still lingers in the walls, Teddy wondering once more who put up the protection spells that kept his father from the world, that kept him from his wife and unborn child he easily could have destroyed while transformed. Teddy has never had an interest in lycanthropy, unlike Vic who wanted to understand: part of him felt his father maybe didn’t want him to understand. Teddy was born with the luxury of never having to suffer what his father did, comments about his father being softened with memories of what the man had sacrificed.

Now the basement holds workout machines and weights and benches. Kingsley had helped him set it up, when he was fifteen and the man was courting his grandmother. Kingsley would show Teddy how to work his body, squeeze his skin and tell him the names of the muscles underneath, give him plans for how to meet his goals. When they’d ascend the stairs they’d normally be laughing, and Andromeda would have dinner ready on the table, and they’d sit there and laugh and eat and drink and his grandmother would look at Kingsley in a way Teddy had never seen her look at a man, and Teddy would be happy his grandmother had found someone new to love, having lost her husband and her daughter, Kingsley having lost his wife and his son.

They’d tell stories of when they were in Slytherin together, and Kingsley would talk about how wild and rebellious Andromeda had been, and she’d shake her head and repeat “No! No! No!” and the ghosts of the first Edward and of Nymphodora and of the first Remus would be quiet as the dining room filled with happiness and family and promise.

He gave his grandmother away in a suit she’d bought him for his seventeenth birthday, to be worn at a wedding, and it was just Teddy and his grandmother and Kingsley and Kingsley’s secretary and the ministry official presiding over the ceremony. The next day they dropped Teddy with his Head Boy badge off at the train for Hogwarts and departed on their honeymoon, and Teddy laughed at the way they held hands or giggled or blushed, and the laughter lasted most of the way to Hogwarts as he told Vic, and a good part of the next two weeks until Kingsley was there in Headmistress McGonagall’s office, and he knew.

The assassin had meant to get Kingsley but Andromeda had stopped him.

His mind can still hear his own voice, hollow, saying, “At least she died how she lived,” to Kingsley who clapped his shoulders then hugged him close and they cried like that for a long time and then never spoke of it again.

Now the house is his, and Kingsley is a stranger, and old protection spells linger in the wall decades after they were needed.

* * *

## IX

She labors down the stairs, eyes scanning for him in the backyard before coming back in. She moves down the next set of stairs and hears the machine, the weight coming up and then clicking back down, his grunts as he works his body. Victoire stands at the bottom, holding her stomach that made her back ache, waiting for any day now, and there’s Edward, shirtless, in his relaxed form.

Her husband told people about it though he didn’t let them see, about how according to his medical record, his body was 30% burns and 35% other disfigurements, scars from spells, from knives, from bullets that one time. They cover his arms and legs and chest and back and face, and he didn’t want the children to see him like this because he was afraid they’d be scared, scared to see their scarred father. He would sometimes tell her about imagining his father’s body, how he was scared to see his scarred father before his eyes. How could he do that to another?

He lets the machine have a break, sitting, leaning over himself, face in his hands.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says and it’s so strange to hear his voice but see the Black black hair and that incredibly pale skin and those eyes that are his grandmother’s look at her finally.

Victoire moves carefully, to stand between his legs, and he presses his face into her stretched skin, moving her shirt to expose her stomach and touch it and hold himself to the potential waiting inside her.

Then he cries.

He cries and he cries and he cries, and she holds his head, and her feet ache and her back hurts but she doesn’t move, she lets him cry because he needs to get it all out, he needs to feel these things, he’d taught her that, that you need to feel what you feel to move on, even though he’d never moved on from his parents, never truly felt what he feels about them to move on.

He kisses her stomach before biting the flesh, which takes her by surprise, teeth scraping against her skin before he pushes his forehead in and then shifts so it’s his chin digging into her, his eyes upward devoted to her.

“I can’t go back,” he breathes and she nods, swallowing hard. “I can’t ever go back.”

“No one can take this from you,” Victoire whispers because she is the wife of Edward Remus Lupin, so this is her job here, to comfort him, to say the right things, to let him know it’s ok and that he’s done enough. “No one can hold you up to some standard but you.”

“I can’t ever make you go through that again,” and tears stream over his cheeks, and he’s so ugly like this when he cries, and so beautiful too. “I can’t put the kids through that, what my parents put me through, but more than that I can’t put you through that again, you’re my everything Victoire, I love you so much and I’d die without you and you’ve already had your knock on the door in the night, I can’t ever make you do that again.”

She smiles, and realizes she’s crying, and holds her husband’s face in her hands. “Edward.”

“I would die,” he repeats, “without you,” and she needs him then, needs to feel him pressed against her, inside her, as close to her as can be, because they’re two parts of the same person and she can’t ever go through that either but had no right to say it.

“Edward.”

* * *

“Excuse you, young lady,” and Espie giggles, crawling into her father’s lap despite his words. Victoire beside him takes his hand, watching her parents and two uncles and two aunts move the food from the kitchen to the dining room, Remus between them trying to help. “Who taught you to behave like this?”

“You did,” Espie says, planting her hands on her father’s chest to push herself up to stand and look at him. Edward tries to be serious, leveling a scowl at her, but it breaks and then he kisses and hugs her close, and Victoire can hear her mother sighing.

“Where are you going to sit?” her father asks Remus who looks around, sees Hermione and Ron take their seats, then plants himself between Hermione and Victoire. Bill laughs and sits across from him, Fleur taking Espie’s seat as Harry and Ginny join them. “Have you been helping your mother?”

“Yes I have, I’ve been very good haven’t I?” Remus looks up at her expectantly and she smiles and strokes his face.

“Yes you have, you’ve been a good helper.”

“And what about you?” Edward asks of Espie. “Have you been helping?”

“I eat ice cream,” Espie responds, taking her father’s spoon and sticking it in her mouth. Edward looks at Victoire and shrugs.

“That’s not helping!” Remus protests.

“It’s helping in a way,” his father counters. “If we had a massive ice cream problem in the house, Espie would indeed be helping.”

The boy frowns. “We don’t have a massive ice cream problem.”

“Of course not, because Espie takes care of it for us!” Edward says as if it was obvious which only makes Remus scowl.

“I think you’re being silly.”

Edward feigns hurt, Victoire happy to watch her husband and son volley back and forth. “You wound me, Sir, with your sword and words.”

“Because I speak the truth.”

Espie responds with a raspberry sound and the clattering of the spoon to the floor.

“They’re very different children,” Ginny laughs, Harry nodding, but it’s Bill who quips,

“You talk to Espie like she’s a toddler, Teddy, but here’s what I don’t get: why do you talk to your son like he’s a middle aged man?”

Edward’s whole face lights up, and Victoire’s heart is threatening to burst from her chest at the sight of her husband so handsome, so caring, so tender, the head of the table and the man he always wanted to be.

“I don’t know,” Edward starts, gesturing to their son, “his name is Remus, how else am I suppose to talk to him? Remus is a lofty name for a six year old, you really have to grow into it I’ve realized.”

The table laughs, Remus squirming out from Hermione’s arm to run to his father who lifts him up too, and Victoire feels the baby move as her husband grins at her.

* * *

## X

Bill had confessed to him that Dominique was the universe paying him back for what he’d done to his parents, shortly after she announced she was moving to Egypt to be a Curse Breaker just like he’d been. Teddy most remembers feeling proud in that moment that his father-in-law was truly treating him like a son, like he belonged.

Now Dom has been missing for three weeks in Egypt, along with two other Curse Breakers who’d gone with her. Her last letter to Vic, the last communication anyone knows she had, detailed her suspicion that the next tomb she’d be working her way through held clues to the history of lycanthropy and that she wanted to do this for Vic’s family, so that her nephew and niece and Teddy too would have answers to the condition that had inflicted his father.

It had been a painfully thoughtful thing to write, Teddy holding his wife as Bill read the letter to the awaiting group and Fleur sobbing inconsolably.

But he doesn’t have to explain any of this to Scorpius who stops by to ask if he can help on his way home, Albus visiting his father. Teddy had long ago given up on understanding that adopted brother of his when Jamie was easier to read than a book and Lee loved to tell people Teddy was her favorite brother.

“I suppose if you averaged them together, your wife and her sister,” Scorpius comments as they sit at the dining room table, “you get an average life.”

Teddy snorts in agreement. “Nothing average about my in-laws, I can assure you of that. They don’t really do things by halves.”

“It’s why you integrate so well with them,” and Teddy raises an eyebrow for his cousin to continue. “You’re much more like the Weasleys than the Malfoys, for a lot of reasons, but that’s a big one I think. My family’s main goal in life currently is to be as painfully boring and nondescript as possible, to compensate for past transgressions.”

“Yeah I suppose that’s fair.” The first time Teddy had even talked to his second cousin was when Scorpius’s mother died and the boy had written to ask if they could maybe be friends one day, because Scorpius only had one friend and not a lot of family, and he admired Teddy greatly, and his grandmother had been telling him stories of Teddy’s grandmother, and his grandmother seemed really upset about the things she’d done, and he didn’t want to be the cousins who never talked, and then he’d apologized for writing him, and then he’d apologized for apologizing.

Scorpius Malfoy was something else, and Teddy liked him for it. Lucious and Draco Teddy held in cool contempt, and Narcissa was tolerable in writing because it meant he got stories of Andromeda that no one else knew, but Scorpius was the real redeemer of that branch of the family: awkward, nerdy, ambition only to discover new things, married to a man just as moody with just as complicated a family relationship as him.

“When the baby comes,” Teddy starts, “which is like any hour at this point… do you want to come help and see what it’s like?”

The blond blinks, and thinks, then shrugs. “Yeah sure. I don’t really want kids myself, and neither does Albie, but I have learned there’s such a thing as ‘cool uncle’ and I want to be that.”

* * *

Teddy’s barely closed the door, turning to go upstairs and check on Vic who kept threatening to burst at any moment, when there’s someone in the Floo: it’s Bill.

“I am so sorry,” his father-in-law starts. “Are the rest of them awake?” Teddy shakes his head.

“No, just me closing up, though Vic has been in and out of bed all day. Do you have news of Dom?” Vic had wanted her sister there with her but at this point Teddy wasn’t sure they’d even find a body, though he wouldn’t dare say that out loud.

Bill sighs, falling onto a couch, so Teddy joins him.

“That’s my answer I guess.”

“Lou wrote.”

“That feels like an ominous start.”

The man next to him rubs his face, leaning his head over the back of the couch and biting his lip as if contemplating how to deliver what his only son had written.

“Do you need me to go talk to him?” Teddy preemptively offers. When Lou turned fifteen, he stopped talking to his father and stopped listening to his mother. His sisters could maybe get through to him, Vic more than Dom, but it was Teddy that he responded to for some reason. Now the young man was eighteen in his last year at Beauxbatons, and there were… serious rumors in the French papers about what he’d been up to.

“I can’t ask that of you,” Bill replies. “I can’t take you from our girl right now.” With Bill, Vic was “our girl,” and Teddy knew that was an honor. “And besides, I don’t know that it’d help. I… I just want to leave him to fend for his own on this one, it’s a mess he made and it’s a mess he needs to be held responsible for. Fleur feels differently — not for him, but for the political ramifications.”

Teddy’s head whips to the man’s face. “Political ramifications?”

“Guess who’s son may or may not have knocked up the engaged and expected to be a virgin daughter of a foreign Minister for Magic?” Bill covers his face and groan.

* * *

“My family is falling apart,” Vic breathes between contractions into Teddy’s ear. Her mother and two aunts are outside the bedroom with the Healer, discussing Lord knows what out of earshot. Teddy imagines it’s about the risks of this birth, and what to expect and do should something happen, which he wants no part of. He’d made it clear to everyone he could that if it came down to a choice, Victoire Fleur Lupin was the more important life to save.

So he helps keep her in a strange squat on the floor, his wife pressed against his chest, and she moans as the baby descends further, and Teddy holds her and kisses her head.

“If it makes you feel better, it does mean you’re winning at being your parents’ favorite child,” and his wife laughs.

“Dominique did always say only one of us had to turn out respectable to prove Daddy and Maman were descent parents, and that that would be me.

“It’s weird, being respectable,” and she squeezes his thighs as another contraction takes hold of her, Teddy doing all he can to help and knowing it’s not enough.

* * *

Percy has the kids at Shell Cottage, because while they like their grandparents’ home more, their grandparents both want to be here in case… well, in case.

Audrey assists the Healer, Fleur counting for her daughter, Teddy behind her holding her legs. The thrill of Remus’s birth and the ease of Espie’s is absent, as if they were all diviners who together shared a cloudy premonition.

But Teddy can’t think of that, focused on Vic and what she needs as she pushes, and she pushes, and people are saying words but they’ve lost all meaning, neither English nor French nor any language known to Edward Remus Lupin, who can only hear and see his wife with tears on her face and muscles that are so tense and a body that maybe, finally, cannot do this.

There’s more sound and then Vic relaxes into him, relieved, breathless, and looking down Teddy finally smiles because there’s a baby, their baby, their family complete, but he looks to Vic and something’s wrong and the women spring to action and it all becomes a blur to him.

“Victoire,” he repeats, over and over, even as he’s pushed away and his wife is motionless.

She’d done this for them.

She’d done this for him.

* * *

She’d always thought of everything before he even knew he needed it, had since she was six and he was eight, because Vic was a perfect human if ever there was one.

Theodore, she had told him, which had made him laugh because a lot of people in his life had mistakenly thought that Teddy was short for Theodore, not Edward, and he’d told her he didn’t want to name a son after himself.

There was Remus Guillaume Lupin, named for his two grandfathers.

There was Hope Andromeda Lupin, named for two great-grandmothers.

But Theodore Edward Lupin had been what Victoire insisted on, because while Teddy had said he would never name a child after his mother — he may have never known her but he knew she hated the name — that didn’t mean they couldn’t share part of a name, a Dore instead of a Dora, this precious gift from God, and that had made Teddy cry because Vic had always thought of everything before he even knew he needed it.

And now…

And now.

The children are asleep, someone is watching the baby — Teddy has stopped paying attention to who comes and goes —, and Vic is still as she was, unconscious in their bed, barely holding onto life. When he manages to sleep, which has become rare, he lays beside her, curled up against her, as if he could protect her from the world, as if he could give his life for hers. He can barely look at his children, the baby in particular whom he thinks he might hate. Espie cries and cries for someone to devote themself to her in the distance of her father, and Remus hides away in secret places as if silently asking to be found, to be rescued.

But no one is ever truly rescued. Not in this family.

* * *

Teddy is on the couch, staring at nothing, thinking nothing, because nothing was safe: safe from the images of Vic in the last moments of childbirth, safe from the images of her with the children, safe from the images of her on their wedding days, safe from the images of a happy family that once was, safe from the images of his parents and grandparents.

But no one is ever truly safe. Not in this family. Not in any family.

The Floo lights up, then dies down, and Teddy doesn’t move, just waits, as Harry moves before his vision. The two men say nothing, staring at one another, and Teddy can feel the nothing and danger in his godfather, the same nothing and danger that was in him.

That was all they were, after all.

They were nothing.

They were danger.

His godfather moves, the cushion of the couch moves, and Harry half faces him, begins in a slow voice to speak, and Teddy tries to ignore him but can’t, his heart racing, his ears perked for the soft cries of his children, the soft creak of a bed that would mean his wife isn’t dead, she’s alive, truly alive–

“The day you were born, your father told us. Merlin! he was so ecstatic,” Harry laughs, “I’d never seen Remus like that before: truly happy. He had photos of you, already, and your hair–” he runs a hand through it, turning Teddy to face him though saying nothing of the tears on the younger man’s face “–was already changing, and there was this one photo of you on your mother’s chest just after you were born, and Remus beside the two of you, and I didn’t realize it then but that was the moment. That was the moment a man know what it’s like to have a child, that first moment with this woman you love so much and now there’s this other life she made, and your father almost didn’t have that moment, he thought he didn’t deserve it, but deserving children isn’t about what you’ve done before them, it’s about what you do for them.

“I’ve often wondered about that moment for my parents, for my father, because I’ve never found a photo of it, but I know it happened. I know it happened because your father told me it did, in a letter he wrote me the day you were born, because he felt he owed me so much of what had been taken from me, and he wanted me to do the same for you if so much was also taken from you.

“And I’ve tried my best, Teddy–” Harry is crying now too “–even though I know just as well as you do that it’s never enough. And those children need you but you are still a child, you will always be someone else’s child, and your children need you but you still need your parents. I know you do, Teddy.” Harry presses their foreheads together, arms slipping around him to hold him. “Let me help you, Teddy, please.”

His throat is so tight he can’t breathe, and he tries to stand to get away but Harry stands with him, keeps holding him, and it all wells up, the wave crests and crashes, and this is the house Teddy was born in, that was the room Teddy was born in, and his father was there beside his mother just as Teddy had been for Vic, and he can’t take it, his knees give up, he buckles and collapses and Harry catches him and holds him, and they’re on the floor, Teddy straining against him arms like a child being held, and his voice he’s not heard in days is foreign as he cries out, over and over,

“Daddy! Mummy! Daddy! Mummy!”

“Teddy,” Harry answers, over and over, “Teddy, Teddy, oh Teddy, my Teddy."

“Daddy! Mummy!”

“Teddy, Teddy.”

“Daddy!”

“Teddy.”

“Mummy!”

“My Teddy.”


End file.
